I should have known the Sat Nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through what looked like someone's back garden in Jonkoping. Three hours from Gothenburg, bleary-eyed from an early flight, and there I was arguing with a disembodied voice about whether a gravel track marked "Ej genomfart" counted as a proper road. Spoiler: it did not. I reversed past a very patient woman hanging her washing, offered what I hoped was an apologetic smile, and finally found the proper turn for Rudaholm some twenty minutes later, feeling about as competent as a moose on roller skates.

The cottage itself sat among birch trees with that particular Swedish stillness you cannot quite believe until you experience it. Red paint, white trim, the whole genuine article. I was still fumbling with the key box when a voice called out from next door, belonging to a chap called Lennart who appeared to have been waiting for this moment his entire life. Seventy-something, wearing overalls that had seen genuine labour, and clutching a mug that read "Varldens Basta Morfar" despite his protests that his daughter had bought it ironically.

"You are the English," he announced, which I suppose was fair enough. "I am watching for you since the morning. The last guests, they drove into the ditch." He said this with evident satisfaction, as if confirming some theory about foreign drivers. Within minutes I had learned his entire philosophy on ditches (avoidable with proper winter tyres), his opinion of the key box system ("for people who cannot be trusted with real keys"), and his late wife Ingrid's recipe for pickled herring, which he still makes monthly in quantities that suggest he is feeding a small army rather than himself.

I had scarcely unpacked when another character materialised. Karin, Lennart's daughter, arrived with a loaf of bread and a warning that her father talked too much. She ran what she called a "proper" BandB in Huskvarna proper, and regarded the holiday let system with the suspicion usually reserved for tax inspectors. "You are self-catering," she said, handing me the bread anyway. "This means you suffer. But not with bad bread." She had the efficient kindness of someone who had spent decades managing other people's incompetence, and within five minutes had established my entire itinerary, pronounced it "not completely stupid," and departed with the air of someone who had done her civic duty.

The bread, incidentally, was extraordinary.

That evening, walking the lane in the half-light that passes for darkness in a Swedish June, I encountered a younger man called Anton who was walking what he described as his "mental health dog," a chaotic creature named Sture who appeared to have no training whatsoever. Anton worked remotely for a gaming company in Stockholm and had moved to his grandmother's old house during the pandemic, then simply never left. "She is dead, so it is not awkward," he explained, which I suppose was one way of putting it. He spoke of the village with the particular exasperated affection of someone who had tried to escape and failed, pointing out which houses belonged to which cousins and which feuds dated back to boundary disputes in the 1970s.

I mentioned Lennart. Anton laughed, properly, for the first time. "Lennart knows everything. He does not know he knows everything, which is worse." He invited me to coffee the following morning, then immediately rescinded the invitation upon remembering he had a deadline. "But you will stay long enough to understand," he said, which felt less like a question and more like a prophecy I was not certain I wanted fulfilled.

By the time I fell asleep that first night, to the particular silence of a place without motorway hum, I realised something slightly uncomfortable. I had spoken to three strangers in one evening and learned more about their lives than I knew about most of my neighbours in London. There was something almost aggressive about the openness, or perhaps it was simply that I had grown accustomed to a more guarded way of moving through the world. Either way, I lay there listening to what I eventually identified as an owl, feeling unexpectedly raw and unexpectedly welcomed, wondering whether the Sat Nav's incompetence had been some strange gift after all.

The morning would bring its own characters, Lennart had promised, and coffee that was "not the English kind, proper coffee." I suspected I would drink it regardless, and probably ask for more.